News from the King County GIS Center

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One of the most satisfying things that a well-made map can do is convey a sense of place. And an especially well-map map may convey a sense of a past place that both infuses and transcends a present location. I came across such a map yesterday just a few blocks from our own King County GIS Center location, where Seattle’s Pioneer Square transitions to the International District, specifically the historic Japantown.

Government leaders inevitably leave long paper trails and numerous digital footprints. One of the newest marks made by our own current King County Executive, Dow Constantine, honors his first predecessor in his office, Gov. John Spellman who died on Tuesday. Remembrances of Gov. Spellman this week prompted me to reach back into my personal archives for a record of when then County Executive Spellman’s paper trail and my much more humble one intersected.

The re-use and re-purposing of map elements, especially digital map data, may seem simple and obvious since we are far past the time when the availability and use of digital data and production practices became the norm in cartography. But it hasn’t been all that long since the time when mapmakers were beholden to the technical strictures imposed by mechanical map construction methods.

Lying at the foot of Cougar, Squak, and Tiger mountains, the City of Issaquah is uniquely situated as a natural starting point for exploring the Issaquah Alps via hundreds of miles of trails that are accessible from numerous trailheads in and near the city. Issaquah recently published a new citywide-plus trails map created by the King County GIS Center Client Services group…

The first three months of 2017 kept us busy in KCGIS Center Client Services producing maps for publication. Our lineup of projects included major revisions to long-popular core products for two King County divisions and one exciting new map for an external client.